Abstract
Authors tend to portray, and critics to analyze, the character of Morgan le Fay in dichotomous terms, as either a benevolent healer who tends to Arthur after his final battle or as an evil witch out to bring Arthur down. Sometimes both these roles are attributed to Morgan in the very same source, such as in Malory, where she is viewed by the other characters (and critics) as attempting to destroy knights, kill Arthur, and demolish Camelot. Yet at the end of the Morte, this most enigmatic of characters comes to heal Arthur’s wounds, scolding him in a comforting fond-older-sister tone for getting hurt so that she must take care of him.1 Morgan displays changeable behavior from text to text as well; she is widely accepted as a benevolent healing force in earlier medieval works, while other eras often judge her pejoratively. Even in contemporary fantasy, authorial use of Morgan’s voice, and the addition of motives for her actions either try to redeem her or ultimately relegate her to malevolent roles.
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Notes
Sir Thomas Malory, Malory: Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 716.
Norris J. Lacy, ed., The Fortunes of King Arthur (New York: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 94–95.
Helaine Newstead, Bran the Blessed in Arthurian Romance (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 149.
Elisa Marie Narin, “‘Þat on… Þat oÞer’: Rhetorical Descriptio and Morgan La Fay in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Pacific Coast Philology 23 (1988): 60–66. Morgan only partly fits the description of a supernatural ‘enemy’ provided by Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudri; see n. 13, below.
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 115.
Raymond Thompson, “The First and Last Love: Morgan le Fay and Arthur,” in Arthurian Women, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Routledge, 2000), 340–41.
Elizabeth S. Sklar, “Thoroughly Modern Morgan: Morgan le Fey in Twentieth-Century Popular Arthuriana,” in Popular Arthurian Traditions, ed. Sally K. Slocum (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1992), 28–29.
Maureen Fries, “Female Heroes, Heroines, and Counter-Heroes: Images of Women in Arthurian Tradition,” in Arthurian Women: A Casebook, ed. Thelma S. Fenster (New York: Routledge, 1996), 61. In multiple articles, Fries sees Morgan as “the oldest and most persistent example of the female-counter-hero.” She traces Morgan’s behaviors to mythological archetypes, concluding that her degeneration from a healing fay to a malevolent witch is the result of “the inability of male Arthurian authors to cope with the image of a woman of power in positive terms” (61).
Sarah Appleton Aguiar, The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 13.
Hilda Ellis Davidson and Anna Chaudri, Supernatural Enemies (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001), viii. Italics mine.
Stephen G. Nichols, The New Medievalism, ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 1.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, trans. and ed. Basil Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973);
Etienne de Rouen, “Draco Normannicus,” ed. R. Howlett, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I vol. 2, Rolls Series 85 (London, 1885);
Gerald of Wales, “De Instructione Principis,” in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, et al., vol. 4, Rolls Series (London, 1873);
Gerald of Wales, “Speculum Ecclesiae,” in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, et al., vol. 4, Rolls Series (London, 1873).
See Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness, trans. Carl T. Berrisford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 81–83,
and Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 3–4.
Norris J. Lacy, ed., The Lancelot-Grail: The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation (New York: Garland, 1993).
Thomas Chestre, Sir Launfal, ed. A. J. Bliss (London: T. Nelson, 1960).
J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, eds., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. 2nd ed., revised by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. Thomas Hahn (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995);
Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans. Cyril Edwards (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2004).
Sir Thomas Malory, Malory: Works, ed. Eugene Vinaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). According to P. J. C. Field, the best candidate for the author of Le Morte Darthur is the Sir Thomas Malory from Newbold Revell, an alleged rapist, extortionist, and thief (among other crimes), whose uncle Sir Robert may have been one source for Malory’s treatment of chivalry. See chapter 3.
Geoffroi de Charny, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation, ed. and trans. Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).
Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche (New York: Penguin, 1978);
John Pfordresher, A Variorum Edition of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973).
Arthurian Literature by Women, ed. Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack (New York: Garland, 1999);
John Blades, ed. John Keats: The Poems (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon (New York: Del Rey, 1982);
J. Robert King, Le Morte D’Avalon (New York: Tor, 2003);
Nancy Springer, I Am Morgan le Fay: A Tale from Camelot (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001).
As many authors have pointed out, the definition of ‘fantasy,’ particularly in relation to the term ‘genre,’ is nearly impossible to pin down. For the purpose of this work I follow Rosemary Jackson’s assertion that while “Literar y fantasies have appeared to be free from many of the conventions and restraints of more realistic texts,” “Fantasy is not to do with inventing another non-human world: it is not transcendental. It has to do with inverting elements of this world… to produce something… apparently ‘new’, absolutely ‘other’ and ‘different’…. Such violation of dominant assumptions threatens to subvert (overturn, upset, undermine) rules and conventions taken to be normative.” Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1995), 1–14. Retrieved from Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=k2aboboVP5MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=rosemary+jackson+fantasy&source=bl&ots=IUq7JiTUYb&sig=JoXb0z18RauA3EeD9R1Bt0EXJcE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xnE-UPK1MIz68QSBtYGoBw&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=rosemary%20jackson%20fantasy&f=false, accessed June 14, 2012.
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© 2013 Jill M. Hebert
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Hebert, J.M. (2013). Introduction: To Be a Shapeshifter. In: Morgan Le Fay, Shapeshifter. Arthurian and Courtly Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137022653_1
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